The Committee took over the dining area when the general left for his
tour of inspection. While the steward's department was preparing coffee
for the interviewees, now assembling in the corridor, the four members
of the Committee arranged themselves at the larger of the tables.
Notepaper lay before them.
Mr. Tucker lighted a cigar and fingered it. "A rather good meal," he
said.
The others nodded.
"I may as well start off, while we're waiting," Mr. Wallace said. "I'll
summarize my somewhat contradictory observations.
"Superficially, the cultural level of the natives appeared quite
primitive. The absence of tools would normally be indicative. On the
other hand, the city was carved from rock in a way so as to suggest a
very sophisticated technology. And writing, while apparently not
practiced to any considerable extent, was known--or, if not writing as
we understand it, some advanced decorative technique. We've found two
lines of it, at least.
"Again superficially, the city would suggest a nomadic tradition, but
for its craftsmanship. It seems independent of any obvious supply of
food and their equivalent of water, if any. Nor were any provisions in
evidence for the disposal of waste products. Yet the city had the
appearance of age and continual usage. If you notice, the floor of the
recess was worn unevenly toward the center by what I should guess to be
the traffic of several centuries.
"The thought naturally occurs that the aliens were the rather decadent
relics of a highly developed technological civilization existing on the
planet in the not too distant past. Yet Miracastle offers no evidence
for the existence of a prior technology--no ruins, no residual
radioactivity from atomic operations. In short, the city has no apparent
genesis in the past.
"The alternative arises: perhaps the natives were not natives at all,
but immigrants or colonists like ourselves. Yet the age of the city
contradicts this.
"Perhaps there is a simple explanation, although it does not occur to
me. But I do have this feeling. The city was utilitarian. To me, it
calls to mind one of those exquisite etchings of Picasso. The severe
economy of line suggests simplicity. Yet, on further inspection, you see
that each line contributes to a rather bewildering variety of
perspectives. I strongly suspect that the city and the people of
Miracastle will remain one of the great, unsolved mysteries of the
universe."
Mr. Wallace was finished with his remarks.
Mr. Ryan nodded. "Perhaps I'm deficient in sensibilities, but I find
that the most ... agonizing ... thing of all is not ever to be able to
know what these people were like. It's almost as if some part of us had
been lopped off, isn't it? What did the people of Miracastle think
about? What was their philosophy of life? What was their social
organization? What was their ultimate goals? When you realize how much
we learned of ourselves from an examination of our own primitive
cultures, the sense of loss really comes home. Think how much more we
could have learned of ourselves by acquiring the perspective of a truly
alien culture. It's almost as if we could really understand ourselves at
last if we could only understand a totally alien culture ..."
"Well, that's gone," Mr. Tucker said. The words were brittle and
discrete. They hung in memory and the listeners waited as though for an
echo of something shouted into a canyon. The echo did not come.
They were silent. Grief is the final knowledge of time. When one first
learns that it can never be turned backward upon itself to permit the
correction of past sins and the rightings of wrongs transfixed and
forever unalterable. Grief is the frantic, futile beating of hands
against a barrier without substance, both obscenely unreal and yet the
only reality. Grief is the knowledge that we cannot step backwards
before the death of loved ones and see those precious half-forgotten
dream faces once again. Grief is the knowledge that time is immutable.
Outside the Richardson Dome, the wind was changing. It could now neither
support the life that was nor the life that would be, and it howled in
melancholy and insensate anguish its loneliness and longing to the
eternal and ever-changing pattern of the stars.
* * * * *
The Committee concluded their interviews with an old-line corporal. He
had just short of thirty years service and had several times traveled
the two-way escalator of non-commissioned rank from master sergeant to
private. He was perhaps typical of many of the older soldiers. His love
of the Corps was expressed by his loyalty to it; his hatred of the Corps
was expressed by his inability to abide by its regulations.
"You knew Sergeant Schuster very well?" Mr. Tucker asked.
"He was a new man," the corporal said. "He got on just before lift-off.
A week, two weeks, something like that. I knew him, I guess. He was one
of them kind that was always thinking. And like you know, sir, thinking
ain't too good for a soldier. I've known a lot of guys like that in my
time. You know what I mean? They're not cut out for the Corps."
"He talked to you quite a bit?"
The corporal turned to face Mr. Ryan. "He was always talking, sir. He
was a regular nut. I thought for a while he was queer. He had all those
crazy ideas."
"Like what, Corporal?"
"Oh, like--well, you know." The corporal hesitated and rummaged his
memory without conspicuous success. "Sunsets," he said rather
emphatically. "Talked about sunsets. Talked about just _anything_.
Called me out back on Earth to look at a sunset once, I remember."
"What did he think about killing the natives?" Mr. Wallace asked.
The question alerted the mechanism which produced the almost-Pavlovian
loyalty response.
"We didn't kill no natives," the corporal said. "They just died when we
changed the air. Tough."
He looked at Mr. Wallace and then into the silence around him.
"Well ... well, let's see. I guess you'd say that sort of got to him. I
mean, you know, he thought it was--" the voice became distant, as though
describing a fantastic event which he could not relate to anything in a
rational environment--"he thought it was _his_ fault. You know how some
of these guys are. I used to have a platoon once, you know. And they
say--" He twisted his mouth and changed his voice to a childish whine.
"What _for_?" The voice reverted to normal. "They don't ask for any
reason. They just ask. I say to them, I say, 'God damn it'--excuse me,
sir--'I told you to do it, ain't that enough?' Well, this Schuster, sir,
he worried all the time. He got so he cut himself shaving. Damnedest
thing. Oh, hell, maybe for the last week, every morning, he came out a
bloody mess. Patches of toilet paper all over his face. 'I can't shave,'
he'd say. 'My God, I can't shave.' He wasn't nervous, either. His hands
were okay. They didn't shake. It's just that he couldn't shave. Like I
say, he was a nut."
No one spoke for a moment, and the corporal twisted uncomfortably.